Category: Getting things done

Last week @lanceb147 contacted me on Twitter looking for advice on doing a PhD part time. @lanceb147 is not alone. There’s a surprising number of students doing their PhD part time. At RMIT where I used to work 50% of research students were enrolled part time and this institutional profile is not unusual in Australia. Some are self funded students from the beginning; others have been forced to take up part time study after their scholarship rans out.

Many academics have the impression that part time students are troublesome and take ages to finish, but a study by Pearson et al (see reference below) showed that students who study part time for their whole degree finish sooner and have better results than full time students. Clearly they are doing something right!

I did my research masters over three years part time and worked for 2 days a week for all but 6 months of my PhD. So I know a lot about managing study part time – for me. If there’s anything I have learned about PhD study in all my years of whisperering it’s that everyone is different. So I asked on Twitter if part time students would share their time management secrets with me – and what a rich treasure trove of information they gave me!

I reckon part time students could teach full time students a thing or two about how to manage a long term research project. I have enough from my Twitter conversations for about ten posts, but I will confine myself here to five

Many research students in Australia will be planning to submit their thesis next month. Let’s fast forward to that sweet moment you find out your examiners reports are back, or completed your Viva and been told you have passed. Congratulations! Time to ring up the bank and the passport office to get that long awaited …continue reading.

Suffice to say I only had one emotion when Kylie Budge, PhD student at the University of Melbourne and academic at RMIT, sent me this post. Envy. Let Kylie give you a justification for planning that thesis writing retreat you have always wanted… Ever considered the idea of taking yourself away for a self-imposed thesis …continue reading.

For most students, the problems will be temporary and relatively easily dealt with. Taking up a complaint with the person concerned is the usual, and usually successful, first step. Most complaints never get lodged under formal complaint policies, however this is not always the case as some disputes and concerns cannot be resolved so simply… read on to find out how to complain – and be heard.

Happy new year everyone! Did you make any resolutions? Broken any of them yet? I like New Year’s eve celebrations; for one night at least, profound Change seems possible. It’s refreshing – even if the next day you slip into comfortable old habits. Now we are a month in I have no doubt that many …continue reading.

Recently a Forbes article claimed that being an academic was the least stressful job of 2013. However, a storm of protest on social media forced the author to add an addendum acknowledging that this probably wasn’t the case. In fact academics work a a lot and that work tends to intensify in the so called ‘down time’: January here in Australia and July in the North of the world. Freed somewhat from the distraction of emails and the responsibility of caring for students, us academics inevitably find ourselves not at rest but facing the deep end of the ‘to do’ list.

Just in case you were getting bored by the Christmas holidays, my December Newsletter is out.

In it there are links on writing conclusions, academics behaving badly, information contagion, and teaching like a pirate – amongst other things. All the links were sourced via Twitter over the last month.

If you are preparing to undertake your fieldwork for your PhD, have been on a field trip for your PhD or maybe you are in the middle of fieldwork right now, either way this post is for you. And it has the distintion of being our first post to contain an original poem 🙂

A couple of months ago I published a post called ‘Are you a piler or a filer?’ In it I compared my experience of going paperless to giving up smoking; I have been trying diligently for a year, but still print out about 50 sheets a month.

In response to my post Marek Martyniszyn (@Martyniszyn) sent me a long desccription of his working methods. Marek recently submitted his PhD thesis focusing on international aspects of competition law at the University College Dublin. For the 2012/2013 academic year he joined the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies in the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where as a Senior Research Fellow he will be conducting research on the interface of competition and international law.

The document Marek sent me was very long and detailed. I have decided to publish in two parts because I think this is valuable advice for anyone in the process of giving up the paper habit.

Last time we met my friend, PhD student and working academic ‘Dave’ he was walking through the Valley of Shit. Dave emerged from the deathly valley soon after I published that post, but he has now hit the last phase of PhD study, which I call “PhD detachment”. Dave, somewhat more colourfully, calls this phase “Screw you thesis!”. He tells us why in this post, but caution – there’s some strong language!